How to do a good job of Zhihu marketing for a brand?

Zhihu's commercial marketing system is currently in a breakthrough period, and it has many innovative ways of playing that are not available on other platforms. Let's learn how to do marketing on Zhihu through the following three classic cases.

Ever since Zhihu, which is "indifferent" to commercialization, formally proposed the concept of knowledge marketing, more and more brands have begun to be eager to try out this new open field and frequently want to try out new things.

However, unlike the well-known SNS platforms such as Weibo and WeChat , many brand owners still have only a partial understanding of the marketing methodology of the Zhihu platform. And the group of high-value users who are active on the Zhihu platform are the ones that brands are eager to occupy.

How to do marketing on Zhihu elegantly? This is a question that several of my Party A friends around me have been discussing frequently recently.

I just noticed that there are three winning cases of Zhihu marketing in the recent 9th Golden Mouse Award list, namely:

• Silver Award in E-commerce Marketing - Zhihu x Tmall Double Eleven , a new choice of learning for quality consumption
• Silver Award for Video Marketing Innovation - Zhihu x Infiniti, a thorough analysis of Zhihu live broadcast
• Bronze Award in Mobile Marketing Interaction Category——Zhihu x Google Translate, AI -powered language “knowledge”

Only by following the footsteps of heroes can we find God. Let’s break down these three award-winning cases and see how they did it.

1. Tmall : Knowledge as a shopping guide, new learning options to help with Double Eleven shopping

Question: Having dominated every Double Eleven, how does Tmall come up with new ideas?

As the big brother of every Double Eleven, at a time when online shopping and holiday promotions have become commonplace, how do Tmall and Zhihu bring new expectations to consumers?

Answer: Use knowledge marketing as a shopping guide to influence the audience's consumption decisions and seize the Double Eleven market.

Tmall and Zhihu have realized that for consumers who have formed the awareness of Double Eleven, at this time every year, they have money in their pockets waiting to be spent. However, faced with a dazzling array of brand promotions and bombarded with tens of millions of brand information, young people in this busy era have already become dizzy over which one is real, which one is fake, and which one is the lowest discount in history that only comes once in a thousand years.

On Double Eleven, what they need more than just shopping!

Based on this insight, Tmall and Zhihu jointly presented this "New School Selection Report", organizing the promotional offers on the platform into a guide, influencing consumer decisions in the form of knowledge distribution, and thus achieving user harvesting.

In specific operations, Tmall first used the brand questioning method to raise questions around the core communication of wishing you a happy Double Eleven: Which item you have ever bought has brought you the most happiness? This is to attract attention and achieve the purpose of preheating; at the same time, we invite Zhihu's excellent answerer and home expert Wang Zhenbo to sit in on the Live special scene: How to "decorate" your ideal home during Double 11? Use Zhihu Amway to influence consumer decisions.

During the explosion period, in addition to the consumer reports and new learning H5, Tmall also released a batch of original articles: "Which snacks appear most frequently in your shopping cart?", "Is SLR more advanced than mirrorless? How should a novice choose a good camera?", "From desert skin to large oil fields, how to choose moisturizing products?", "Bring the gym home and exercise well at home"...

A large number of in-depth articles use professional knowledge to guide shopping, arouse consumers' mental resonance, influence the audience's consumption decisions, and combine with in-depth exposure of in-site advertising to help Tmall seize Double Eleven traffic .

2. Infiniti: Using knowledge to attract users to watch the 10-hour car dismantling live broadcast

Question: How does Infiniti break its inherent image and achieve professional advancement?

Infiniti has always been known by consumers for its personalized and niche image. In 2017, Infiniti upgraded from a "dare to love" brand to "Beyond Numbers - Become a Better Self". How can it use the Zhihu platform to change inherent perceptions, enhance the brand's professional performance and achieve advancement?

Answer: Expert team consultation, knowledge and practical knowledge to reshape brand awareness

More and more users are becoming more rational in their decision-making. In today's world of diverse marketing methods, Infiniti has chosen to use the purest technology as its entry point. Zhihu, which focuses on knowledge sharing, is undoubtedly the best marketing platform.

With the knowledge credit endorsement of Zhihu platform, we invited experts to share 10 hours of non-stop car disassembly explanations full of practical information, so that users can see a brand new geek-style Infiniti, so as to change perceptions and reshape the brand.

In terms of creative implementation, Infiniti chose the currently popular live broadcast method to face users in the most straightforward way, making the product display more intuitive and facilitating deeper user understanding. As a result, this 10-hour non-stop shocking car dismantling event based on Zhihu's "knowledge live broadcast" was officially launched.

Infiniti invited the technical director of the 4S store to personally disassemble the technical details of the new model for everyone. Zhihu mobilized Wang Yin, a well-known automotive media person on the platform, and Wu Yue, an excellent Zhihu answerer and automotive engineer, to participate in the live broadcast on behalf of the brand, vertical media, and Zhihu users.

In the end, nearly 14K+ users participated in the event throughout, attracting a large number of excellent respondents on the site, making it a benchmark case for the entire site's Live special event.

The charm of knowledge marketing does not stop there. The high-quality content produced in the Live broadcast is summarized as original articles for secondary dissemination, and professional in-depth analysis is completed in text, further strengthening users' awareness of Infiniti's continuous innovation in the field of technology.

The relevant articles were read and shared in large quantities, and the long-tail dissemination effect generated by the knowledge was brewing for three months, and finally brought the brand a total exposure of more than 200 million.

3. Google : Popularizing knowledge brings AI technology brands closer to users

Question: How did Google get the public interested in complex neural network translation technology?

In the minds of the public, AI technology has always been synonymous with being high-end and difficult. Take Google, for example, its neural network translation technology is extremely sophisticated. How to make the majority of users deeply understand and have a favorable impression of its products has become the primary goal of Google promotion .

Answer: Use Zhihu Q&A sharing to reduce professional knowledge and bring AI closer to users

Compared to the high-brow topic of "machine translation", "human translation" is more easy to understand. Therefore, on the Zhihu platform, Google plays the role of a missionary. It starts with topics that are actively discussed on the site, such as literature and language expression. It first establishes links with Zhihu friends and stimulates their interest through the highly interactive product "Brand Questions". Then, while constantly interacting with Zhihu friends, it gradually increases the depth of the content by comparing it with "manual translation" and outputting "machine translation" content.

In the process, it successfully sparked heated discussions among Zhihu users on topics such as "language", " artificial intelligence ", and "machine translation", allowing more users to acquire translation knowledge and understand the "beauty of language and translation", thereby becoming interested in neural network translation technology and falling in love with "Google Translate".

IV. Summary: Using knowledge to capture consumers’ cognitive minds

By analyzing these three cases, we found a commonality: brands must first sort out the marketing goals they want to achieve, but generally speaking, the marketing goals of all brands are actually the same, which is to touch your target consumers and make consumers aware of the brand.

This requires further refinement, and it is necessary to know what kind of perception the target audience has of the brand. For example, what Tmall Double Eleven wants to convey is Double Eleven, and there are countless discounts on Tmall; what Infiniti wants to convey is the excellent technical content of the car body.

After achieving this goal, we used Zhihu's brand questions to conduct UGC mental communication with users, and used multi-dimensional means such as original articles and knowledge live broadcasts to carry out communication design. The credibility of knowledge itself enables the brand to spread quickly into the minds of users. At the same time, the long-tail effect of knowledge itself will help the content continue to spread and ferment, forming an effect that starts from Zhihu but is not limited to Zhihu.

At this stage, Zhihu's commercial marketing system is in a breakthrough period, and it has many innovative ways of playing that other platforms do not have, so this stage is the best time for brands to enter. Just like so many WeChat Moments ads , the ones that impressed us the most in the end are definitely those from BMW, Coca-Cola , and vivo . After all, the first wolf to eat a sheep is bound to attract the attention of a group of wolves.